RAD

You’re not going to like this. As a matter of fact, I don’t like it either. You may feel free to shoot loads of barbs my way, though I won’t have time to respond to them. I just feel like I ought to float an idea. Make of it what you will. And don’t think I don’t realize this is an exercise in armchair speculation. I am a policy maker only in the kingdom of my own imagination. So are you.

Not too long ago, the President and his sock puppets were seeking to bamboozle, er, I mean convince Congress and the American public to okay his misbegotten plan to “punish” the Syrian Fuehrer Assad for gassing his own citizens for the crime of wanting a monster like him out of office. I agreed with the great majority in rejecting the whole enterprise. I had supported George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were noble experiments. They have proven failed experiments. Why walk right back into the lab for another round of trials? I used to regard it as racist to disdain the Middle Eastern nations as not yet ready for democracy. Whether it is racist or not, it now appears to be true. Democracy cannot function in the midst of endless, fanatical sectarian terror. And we ought to have learned that the whole area is a quicksand pit. Good luck with it, Arabs.

Our reluctance to continue in the job of World Policeman inevitably raises the question of Isolationism. President Bush was probably right at least about this: if we don’t fight the terrorists on their own ground, we will more and more fight them on ours. So if we shake the dust from our feet and leave the Islamic countries to their fate, we are going to have to decide how to fight the battle that will follow us home. And I have an idea. This is the part I don’t like any more than you will.

Remember the Cold War policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD for short? We upped the stakes as high as they would go, warning that if either we or the USSR unleashed a nuclear assault on the other, there would be an apocalyptic response. It was a suicide pact and succeeded in making any direct warfare between the parties moot. It just wasn’t a viable option, and neither was any conventional conflict that might lead to it.

But this will not work in preventing the kind of asymmetrical conflict we have with Islamist Jihadis. But this might. I am thinking about a policy of Retaliatory Assured Destruction, a response to any terror strikes on American soil provably linked to Al-Qaida and affiliated demons. In the wake of such a terror incident we would launch annihilating nuclear strikes on any of the countries known to harbor Al-Qaida and not already trying desperately to liquidate them. Such an announced policy might prompt Pakistan, Afghanistan, whomever, to get busy fast trying to exterminate the vermin lest they go down with them. And if they do go down with them, then they asked for it. I’m not talking about regime change. We’ve seen how futile that is. We train the armies of the new government only to have them turn around and shoot our trainers. To hell with that. To hell with them. We will have to play hardball once it’s the only game in town. Israel’s been in spring training for a long time now. We should be, too.

Isn’t this barbaric? Yes, but I fear the world situation as it appears to be shaping up will leave us no other options. If we indulge our tender consciences, we will become accomplices in the demise of Western Civilization (pardon the redundancy).

Europe is on its way to Islamicization. Nice knowin’ ya! The Eiffel Tower will become a minaret. “Idolatrous” art in the Louvre will go the way of those Buddhist rock reliefs in Afghanistan once the Taliban took over (unless we forcibly air lift the treasures out of there—sounds like a good movie plot). You know the crazy Salafists in Egypt want to destroy the “pagan” Pyramids, right? Well, at least we’ve got pictures of all that stuff. These bastards are the locusts from the bottomless pit.

You understand, I’m not hoping any of this will happen; I’m just thinking about the worst case scenario. Somebody has to.

So says Zarathustra.